Walt Disney Said Disneyland Was For “All The World”
The Parks are for the young, the old; parents, singles – whomever!
Recent social media posts and a trolling New York Post op-ed insinuate that childless adults visiting the Disney Parks are weird.
Well, color me weird.
With and without my beloved brood and/or bride, I have visited Disney parks on both coasts alone. I also watch movies alone. And I have actually enjoyed ice cream alone, too.
Hopefully none of the above offends anyone to distraction. But if it does — TOO BAD.
Disneyland Is Your Land
I have it on good authority that Walt himself intended his parks to be enjoyed by “all the world.”
“Here age lives fond memories of the past…” seems to cover most, if not all of the recent ballyhoo.
The following provides more — and simple — corroboration.
Disneyland has been marketing to young childless people since the 50’s pic.twitter.com/IyDJKVLy6L
— Carlyle (@amateurliving) July 26, 2019
But the Washington Post’s Hannah Sampson hit the nail on the proverbial head, hard; several times, too.
She listed the clap back from those the posts most targeted; namely childless millennials:
- Some pointed out Walt Disney World publishes an adult guide to the parks with nary a child in sight, promising “Enchantment for All Ages … Especially Adults!”
- Others questioned whether the company’s reigning childless rodents, Mickey and Minnie, were exempt from the criticism. And others wondered if the real weird ones are parents who bring kids who are too young to form actual memories…
- For the record, and in the sake of journalistic transparency, the writer of this very article is an adult without children who has visited Walt Disney World many times. She does not believe this is weird.
I really LOL’d with the Mickey and Minnie comment. But I really don’t find any of the silliness actually funny.
For those of us who have enjoyed, say, Star Wars movies since birth, much of the critique regarding adults (childless or not) loving a child’s thing harkens back to elementary school torment of the wedgie or nerd-shaming kind; the kind of cooler-than-you gatekeeping that drives folks away from things that they really, really love in high school.
No, I am not a millennial (at 44, Gen X claims me, I think). Clearly, I am not childless (three boys thank you very much). For that matter, neither was Walt — a man who dressed the part when he visited a ranch or rode his backyard model train (?) — when he designed Disneyland.
Thank goodness Walt didn’t let anyone deter him from his dreams. And even though he got the idea for Disneyland by imagining a place where parents and children could enjoy an afternoon together, his opening day speech is very inclusive. Entirely inclusive by my reading, actually.
And, by the way, it is possible to enjoy Disney stress-free – crowds be damned. Just ask a FREE MickeyTravels agent. But I digress.
Reading Fairy Tales
Finally, C.S. Lewis — the dude who wrote The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, who was good friends with J. R. R. Tolkien (who authored The Lord of the Rings) — seems to have thought about the subject of shaming those who retain an inner child.
Perhaps he was defending himself, after all — in this reader’s opinion — the Narnia books should at first be read with a childlike point of view (before you jump into the weighty Christian allegory).
“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” C.S. Lewis
Perhaps there’s something to the idea of visiting the parks as a child, and, in the end never wholly growing up — even when you are a parent.
After all, the guy who invented the parks said: